Graphic Thought Facility has long been at the forefront of British graphic design. Founded in 1990 by RCA graduates and close friends Andy Stevens and Paul Neale, it fast became one of the most influential design studios in the country, on a par with contemporaries like The Designers Republic, Research Studios and Barnbrook.

Where their contemporaries stood out for maintaining a signature graphic style, GTF defined themselves by avoiding stylistic repetition, approaching each new project with a holistic attitude and creating a unique visual language for every brief they took on. With a commercial portfolio of work for The Science Museum, Habitat, Marks & Spencer and Vitra amongst a whole host of others, this expansive approach to design has allowed GTF to segue easily between commercial and public sectors, producing work tailored specifically to their clients’ needs. At the same time they aim always to push the studio’s creative potential in order to produce work that’s as satisfying to the designers as it is to the consumers.

Graphic Thought Facility: Kvadrat

Graphic Thought Facility: Kvadrat

2012 has been a great year for the studio, with a number of hight profile projects occupying their time. Though they’ve produced the identity for the Frieze Art Fair for the past nine years, this year’s campaign raised the bar with some stunning choreographed daylight fireworks – easily one of our favourite projects of 2012. Working closely with photographer Angela Moore, the GTF team created a series of brightly coloured smoke plumes bursting across a deceptively blue autumnal sky.

Despite their undeniable gift for design, the studio’s output consists almost entirely of commercial briefs – a pretty classic design studio setup – with very little self-initiated work ever being published. At Here, Andy will discuss how GTF goes about finding the creative opportunities within these commercial projects to produce a body of work that pushes and pleases the studio whilst at the same time delivering work that clients are happy to pay for.

Here is at London’s Royal Geographical Society on Friday September 21. The event is now sold out but you can add yourself to the waiting list or get more information here.

We’ve been extolling the virtues of graphic designer Sean Freeman since way back in 2008 when some of you were likely still in short trousers and I was at university saying pretentious things about poems I’d half-cribbed from York Notes. In all that time our love for his work hasn’t faded, and while seven years ago we were content to devote just 11 words to Sean, today we’ll dedicate a few more to him to bring you some great recent work.

“It’s a funny thing actually,” Tony Brook tells me, pointing to a series of three posters which have been reprinted especially for design studio Spin’s new exhibition, which opens today. “I was saying this morning to the guys who were putting the show up, when we first made those posters they all just went. 125, bang! Immediately! And we thought that was what would happen every time, because we’d never made anything before. We were disabused of that illusion fairly quickly.”

Spanish studio Clase bcn was tasked with creating the promotional material for The Palau de la Música Catalana’s 2015-2016 season and the result is a playful but refined identity. Encompassing the building’s grandeur, huge banners line the corridors of the concert hall, showcasing the events and people appearing at the Palau, tying them together with a border of lush colours to echo the hall’s eclectic programme. Made up of fragmented shapes the boarder has been translated wonderfully into the other areas of the identity, appearing in milky-coloured pamphlets and a sturdy book.

Annual reports aren’t the most exciting sounding of entities, but in the right hands, they can certainly become beautiful. Take Manchester agency Music’s designs for the British Fashion Council’s 2014/15 annual review. With an all-black cover, gorgeous imagery and bold typography, you’d do well to tell it apart from a slick coffee table tome. The book showcases the BFC’s “five strategic pillars”, according to Music; Business, Education, Innovation & Digital, Investment and Reputation, with imagery from events including London Fashion Week, the British Fashion Awards and London Collections Men.

It goes without saying that we receive more information from screens than we do from paper. But posters are such a superb platform for graphic design experimentation that they seem unlikely to become obsolete. Instead, they’re adapting, and a wonderful example of that shapeshifting is in the smart moving posters of agency Wonder Room. The man behind them is Steve Hockett, who made them in response to seeing his poster designs diluted for online platforms.

You know what we’re like, always going all gaga over pretty colours and GIFS like little typing magpies. But we’re not all about a pretty picture over here at It’s Nice That; and neither is designer Evan Grothjan. While we admit we were initially drawn in by his vivid tones and abstract compositions, it turns out there’s a lot more to his Spaces series than crowd-pleasing aesthetics. Instead, the images form an ongoing investigation into the relationship between space and emotion; something Evan’s been interested in since studying animation as part of his Rhode Island School of Design course.